I am a Latin America focused analyst and writer. I split my time between New York City and Mexico City. I have written feature articles on business, organized crime, politics, and culture for The Atlantic, MONOCLE, Americas Quarterly, The Nation, Lapham's Quarterly, and a number of other publications. I have worked on projects along Mexico's northern border as well as in the hills of places like Jalisco, Michoacan, and Guerrero. I have a Master's degree in International Affairs from Columbia University (SIPA). In the last few years I've had the chance to work on projects in Colombia, Mexico, Guatemala, Chile, Argentina, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, India, and China. Follow me on Twitter: LatAmLENS.

Mexico Is Implementing Reforms, but Still Faces a Challenging Security Dynamic

A few weeks after Enrique Peña Nieto was elected as Mexico’s new president, I walked through the gate in the heavy metal security fence and into the modern, high-tech campus of Mexico’s Public Security Ministry in Mexico City. I watched Francisco Niembro González, who then served as former president Felipe Calderon’s vice-secretary of Information Technology at the security ministry, or SSP for its initials in Spanish, enter into the federal government’s crisis-planning center inside a hermetically sealed bunker. He pulled up a map showing the flight trajectories of cocaine-carrying planes leaving Colombia. Curved red lines marked the flight paths of the smuggling routes between Colombia, one of the world’s top cocaine producers, and Guatemala and Honduras, two countries to the south of Mexico, the gateway country to the United States, the world’s number one cocaine consumer. “Planes with drugs no longer enter Mexico,” Niembro explained, aiming a laser pointer at one of the conference room’s massive display screens. Another room shows graphics of cartel hierarchies. “Evolution of the Michoacán Cartel,” said one poster. “La Familia Michoacána,” said another. The faces in the photos were marked with labels explaining which leaders had been killed or captured. “We’ve invested in technology and the results are there,” Niembro said.

Other analysts have been less sanguine about the results of Felipe Calderon’s security strategy, which aimed to dismantle Mexico’s largest cartels.

Under Calderón’s leadership, Mexico’s government succeeded in pushing drug ferrying planes off its airstrips and into airfields in Guatemala and Honduras. Calderón’s forces also captured and killed a number of high profile cartel leaders. But after more than six years of continuous anti-cartel operations, the traditional strongholds of the embattled organized crime groups have become the most violent and least stable parts of the country.

In the state of Guerrero, for instance, in 2013 armed citizens groups set up roadblocks, taking the law into their own hands. The Los Angeles Timesreported “20 towns in Guerrero along with municipalities in at least four other states reported patrols by armed residents who often wear masks and staff checkpoints.” Alberto Salgado Rodriguez, the president of the Autonomous University of Guerrero, recently said, “people are tired because our authorities have not given a response and I think [the citizen's movement] is a call for attention so that the authorities change the security strategy.”

Acapulco, Guerrero’s biggest tourist city, is now the most violent urban hub in Mexico. The government has established a strong police and army presence within the city, but the violence there and in other more rural parts of the state has continued.

Mexico’s current government, which took office on December, inherited a challenging security dynamic but has promised to work to reduce violence.

On February 12, Peña Nieto announced some details about his multi-tiered crime prevention plan. The president has promised to ensure greater cooperation between local and national crime prevention efforts. His government is creating a new under-secretary of crime prevention to deal with this issue. He also plans to send a new national gendarmerie to patrol the most violent sections of the country and send out specially trained federal police units who will work to fight extortion and kidnapping.

In this February 2013 Brookings Institute report, Vanda Felba-Brown argues that although Peña Nieto has promised to reduce the types of crime that affect ordinary citizens’ lives, “he has been rather vague about how he actually plans to reduce violence, particularly homicides, kidnappings, and extortion.”

Peña Nieto has ended the SSP’s reign as an stand-alone ministry, folding into the larger Ministry of Interior Affairs. (Secretaria de Gobernacion).

He also promises to create a national police force. In addition to taking a more holistic view to reducing crime, security analyst Patrick Corcoran explains that ”Peña Nieto and his team are de-emphasizing the so-called “kingpin strategy”, which was embraced by the previous administration of Felipe Calderon and which focused on taking down the capos like [el Chapo] Guzman.” Peña Nieto’s government has also discontinued the practice of parading suspected cartel leaders before cameras and in general has shifted the international discussion about Mexico away from security and towards the theme of economic growth.

In the long-run, Mexico will need to continue to improve its legal system and enhance the ability of local police forces to maintain order and uphold the rule of law.

Security analyst Sylvia Longmire told me that “Reducing violent crime at the local level is still EPN’s ultimate goal, but [right now] he can’t really pull the army out of so many places so quickly. Ripping off that band-aid will lead to too much bleeding.”

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